Chapter 92: Wading Through The Stagnant Sea The moment Finn crossed the threshold into the Stagnant Sea’s influence, his body immediately felt the difference. Weightlessness overtook him first. It overwhelmed him wholly in an unpleasant way. He could see his wings beating by his sides, but the motion felt disconnected from him, as if it were someone else’s wings flapping. And despite this weightlessness, in a paradoxical contrast that showed just how utterly broken the laws here were, he still somehow felt a corporeal pressure descend on him. It was all-encompassing. It built up inside his chest, behind his eyes, in the marrow of his bones. As if the same gravity that seemed to have disappeared on the outside had instead multiplied on his insides. His organs felt compressed against his spine. His lungs struggled to stretch against ribs that seemed determined to collapse inward. Every heartbeat became a struggle as his heart strained to pump blood that had grown impossibly heavy. Finn’s vision swam. When he glanced back — just to see whether the Husk leader would follow — he saw the Husk leader patiently floating a safe distance away, watching him with an visibly amused look. The Husk leader was moving, Finn was certain of it. His arm was rising, perhaps in a mocking wave, perhaps intending to fire off a final spatial attack... But the motion was wrong. The Husk leader moved as if submerged in sludge. Each increment of his raising arm was in slow-motion... A slow-motion interspersed with abrupt jumps, like watching a flip-book with half the pages missing. Time was... fracturing here. What have I gotten myself into? Dread filled Finn as he reassessed whether he made the right choice. Was he right to have bet his survival on heading into this Stagnant sea? Was his doom more certain with the Husk leader than within this place that the very laws of reality were shattered beyond repair? No! Don’t think! Don’t overanalyze anything. You’re here now! So do everything to survive! Let it go! Let it all go! Just... feel. Finn commanded himself. He forced his consciousness outward, away from the terror permeating his thoughts. Away from the threat of death from the Husk leader behind him... Away from the existential wrongness of the sea that stood vertical against the sky before him. The frozen waves loomed ahead now, filling his entire field of vision. Up close, they were so much worse than from the shore. The impossibility of the wave became apparent in full display, filling him with an existential dread. It was a behemoth, a mountain of roiling dark water caught mid-crash that stretched upward until it touched the sky itself, a wall of frozen ocean that defied every law Finn had ever known. The surroundings immediately darkened. Storm clouds that hadn’t been visible at all from the shoreline now roiled overhead, pregnant with lightning that had never fallen and never would. The goal is to not think, Finn. He kept repeating in his head. He berated himself over and over, berated the fear twisting in his gut. To not think. To not feel. To not— The existential dread still persisted anyway. It washed over him in a wave more devastating than the frozen ocean ahead. No matter how much he tried to pump himself up, it did nothin to help. In the face of this calamity, he was but a speck. An infinitesimal mote of consciousness facing something so vast, and so utterly wrong, that his mind couldn’t help but be in a terrified awe of it, unable to process the scope. Suddenly, he was in the thick of it. The space ahead of him began to warp. Lightning streaked across the roaring darkness, materializing in random locations through broken space without source or destination. A bolt burned into existence ten feet to his left, crackling with purple-white energy. Another above him. Three more below, firing in scattered, nonsensical patterns. The air itself seemed to writhe and distort in a jumble of utter chaos. And yet... Finn’s eyes narrowed. His consciousness, already heightened to the maximum by this terror, finally caught something. There’s a rhythm to it. The chaos wasn’t random. The lightning followed paths — strange paths, impossible paths, but paths nonetheless. The spatial distortions moved in waves, in cycles that his conscious mind couldn’t decipher but his intuition could... his fragment could. Despite trying all he could before to force his use of his fragment, it was only now that it became apparent to him... that he fully tapped into it... I can see it. No. Not me... The distinction formed clearly in his mind as his conscious thought dissolved into something purer. He wasn’t Finn anymore. Finn had fear, Finn could feel terror, Finn could doubt... His mind began to expand. Noise faded to the background. Thoughts faded to the background. Fear faded to the background. Terror faded to the background. Doubt became non-existent... Right now there was no longer Finn. There was only Error. He was only Error. At the vital moment he had latched onto the vague feeling and instinctively immersed himself fully into it just like he usually did with his regular soul masses. Right now he wasn’t looking for safe paths through the chaotic fragmented space of the Stagnant sea... He was the safe path himself. He moved naturally like water finding the cracks in stone. His wings carried him through space in patterns that looked insane. He would bank hard right when the left path seemed clear, diving when climbing made sense, spiraling upward in a tight corkscrew when straight would have been faster. It looked like pure nonsense... But each motion was perfect. Lightning materialized where he wasn’t. Spatial distortions ravaged through the air he’d already vacated. Pockets of broken, frozen time and space opened and closed around him, but he threaded past them with extreme precision, uncaught by their permanent hold. He continued to climb. The frozen wave towered before him and Finn rode across its surface upward. His wings barely flapped now. He was sailing, floating across the currents of chaos itself, using the broken physics like a natural wind updraft. And as he climbed higher, weaving through the chaotic darkness and skimming past the frozen ocean waters, he began to see things. Ships. Massive vessels, larger than anything that could be built in their world, as if this was from a whole different civilization — Massive multi-decked warships with mighty hulls, and even ships that looked like they were built for exploration, yet with sizes that rivaled any he had seen in both his lives. All caught in separate pockets of time, with their sails still billowing with winds that had stopped blowing for ages. They hung in the wave, frozen in their final moments. Some were intact, frozen in the act of climbing the sea wall. Others were breaking apart, splintering in still-motion, with their masts snapping across centuries. Many others had been destroyed, with wreckage scattered through the water in patterns that told stories of struggles that happened ages ago. Finn saw all of them... but his mind didn’t register any of them. In his current state, he only noted their presence in the same way he might regard a droplet of water — with neither interest nor concern. To him they were simply part of the surrounding chaos. Nothing more. But they weren’t the only things he noted. . . . . A/N: I apologize for the late Chapter. It will also be a single Chapter today, but I made sure it was at least slightly longer. Something impromptu came up irl and it took much of my time. I will make up for it with three Chapters tomorrow. P.S: Don’t forget to drop Power Stones and Golden Tickets. It helps a lot. 𝒻𝘳𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝘯𝘰𝑣ℯ𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝘮 Cheers Astrl